


grown to be wild

by graves



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Fluff, Light Angst, M/M, hanahaki, levi loves eren and eren loves levi this is my creed, lots and lots of talk of flowers and sunlight, the lightest!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-15
Updated: 2018-06-15
Packaged: 2019-05-23 14:10:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14935787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/graves/pseuds/graves
Summary: Eren wakes hours before dawn with his hands tearing at his throat.—a hanahaki prompt from tumblr, and its requested continuation.





	grown to be wild

**Author's Note:**

> thank you dear anon who asked for this initially, and other dear anon who asked for the continuation all those months ago. the two parts may read differently, since i wrote the second so far after the first, but that's okay. there's a happy ending and all!

It’s early morning when Eren dresses and leaves the dungeon.  

They don’t keep it locked anymore, but he sleeps down there still, just in case anything happens through the night. He likes the darkness that covers him when he blows the candles out; an all-encompassing quiet that makes him feel some sort of safe he doesn’t think he’d be able to find above ground. When he’s alone down there and everything is still, he wonders if this is how it was in the underground city where sunlight didn’t reach. There couldn’t have been much worry about what was happening above ground, but he doesn’t know anything else about that place. Either way, he figures it had to have been peaceful, at least when it came time for sleep. He’d ask Levi about it, but he doesn’t know the words to use. It’s not like Levi ever talked about it voluntarily, anyway.

Behind the corps headquarters, there’s a field that reaches back into the trees. Just as the sun rises, when the summer air is still tinged with the night’s cold, Eren stands to watch the flowers sway in the wind. It’s not much, but the scattered wildflowers that managed to take root out here remind him of the purple ones that spread through the Shiganshina fields where he and Mikasa gathered firewood. Perhaps he should be sick of flowers by now, all things considered. But the reminders of home are what they are and he can’t bear to let his heart forget.  

His mother was never given a grave, no tombstone, no rest, but he remembers her in the mornings when things feel like they’re from another world. Everyone is still sleeping and nothing has happened, nothing has gone wrong, and he can remember her and pretend that if he turns around, he’d see her there, and it would be okay. If she were here, he thinks she’d hold him while he cried whatever tears he had to shed. He thinks she’d cup her hands beneath his open mouth and she’d whisper his name every time he woke up heartsick with flowers for ailments. Maybe she’d know if they were going to kill him.

After only a few moments, he has to turn back before anyone notices he’s gone. Before he makes it past the stables, someone crosses his path as he walks towards the building.  

It happens the same way it had when he’d first seen him again, after all those years forgetting him; slowly, the rest of the world falling away.  

_Eren is nine years old when he sees Levi for the first time, but it’s only in passing—a brief moment on the streets of his hometown, twigs gathered in his arms, the survey corps there for a few days on their way to report to the capital after an expedition._

_While he’s crossing the street, a man in uniform is standing outside of a flower shop. Eren catches his profile as he lowers his head towards the woman sitting among her wares; flowers, mostly unruly and wild things, blooming across the cobble in bursts of color. The man reaches out while listening to her, the tips of his fingers catching on the purple petals of a small bushel._

_As Eren passes by, he overhears some of their conversation._

_“You like these, sir?”_

_“Yes,” the man answers softly. “They’re my favorite.”_

_That’s all he hears before he’s out of earshot, down the street and headed for home._

_He doesn’t know the man’s name, but that night he dreams of him, purple flowers sprouting from his throat like a nightmare. He wakes in sweat-drenched sheets, hand over his racing heart, the image of bloody flowers and torn-open throats just behind his eyelids. It’s such a frightening thing; he’s used to vivid dreams of his bones cracking under a titan’s palm from all the stories he and his friends tell, but not things like this. He hopes he doesn’t have this dream again._

_It’s still dark outside, so he closes his eyes, willing himself to forget whoever that man was. To forget that face._

_For a while, he does_.

Levi walks in front of him, across his field of vision, giving him a sidelong glance from a tilted head. Their eyes meet and Eren’s glad for the morning sun because it softens Levi’s face and warms his eyes and he looks like a waking dream. His hair sways with the turn of his head, shadows and light dripping over his skin, summer honey down his neck.  

_When he sees the man again, the first meeting that wasn’t really the first time, pulled burning hot from his titan body, he is beautiful, looking over his shoulder to Eren weak in Armin’s arms. Eren thinks it may have set a precedent—that he is always weak for Levi, from the beginning until the end, and on and on and on._

Eren thinks himself wild, a rampant, viscous something tearing through him that’s at odds with how beautiful Levi is. Perhaps it’s the dormant hunger. The love that lays low, tucked long away, coming back, having only laid in wait across time.

He blinks and it feels like forever. But Levi is still there, and it’s all dappled light, a haze of dawn laid over with the spotted shadows of the leaves from the trees that fall over Levi in ways Eren had never seen before. Each time he sees Levi, he thinks he cannot get more beautiful than the last, but he is always wrong, and he is always beside himself with how much it hurts.  

He thinks that Levi will keep walking and leave him with only that moment to tuck away in his heart, like all other moments, but he slows his pace, his boots making small sounds in the dew-covered grass.

“Eren,” he says, voice low and morning-worn. “Where were you off to so early?”

It would be hard to explain, so he just says, “The flowers look beautiful at sunrise.” He wishes he could tell Levi that he does, too, but he can’t bear to be so unkind to his own heart.  

Levi nods, looking behind Eren to the field he’d just left. “I see.  Make sure you’re not late to breakfast.” He steps closer, his shoulder in line with Eren’s. Eren looks to him as his hand comes up, reaching, and rests on Eren’s shoulder. Eren’s heart has raced before, it has pounded from fear and adrenaline and wartime, but it hasn’t done anything quite like this. It beats erratically, skipping around, his pulse thumping against his neck. He swallows thickly like petals clog his throat. Levi’s hand is so warm even through the fabric and he can feel each finger as it squeezes, ever so lightly. “I won’t tell the commander you’d been wandering around.”

“You were wandering around too,” he says, the lightheadedness and adrenaline making him bold. “Where were you going?”

Levi frowns at him, but it’s not really angry. He has seen him angry before, has known the hurt of his punch, but he knows his kindness, too. Eren finds that everything Levi has done in relation to him has been kind, or for the goodness of him. It’s been to protect him, to save him, to teach him. By now, Eren knows Levi’s expressions. He even knows his smile.

He takes his hand away, Eren’s heart going with it. “Quite the little shit this morning, aren’t you,” he says.  

As he walks away, Eren turning to watch him leave, he calls over his shoulder, “Show me the flowers sometime, one of these mornings. I’d like to see what makes them so special.”

Eren had felt faint before, but only now does he have to put his hand on the wall to steady himself. The rest of the day goes by in a fever dream, those words replaying in his head over, and over, and over again until it is well past sunset and it’s time to sleep.

When he gets to the dungeon, he barely makes it to his bed before his chest tightens and his stomach curls, throat burning what’s now become a familiar fire. The flowers come in bouts, in waves, and he can do nothing but blink back tears as they pour from him over the side of his bed. They drop to his floor in patterns of purple and white drenched with blood. Lilacs, again.

It continues for almost an hour, longer than it’s ever lasted. Every time he thinks it’s over, he lurches again, hanging his head and letting his throat tear open. He’s thankful that it’s hard to hear anything from the dungeon and that no guard is posted at his door anymore, because keeping this hidden would be nearly impossible with the sounds he makes. It’s disgusting and ugly and it hurts.  It hurts like grief and long love, like heartbreak, like love not returned. He thinks of Levi. Levi, Levi, Levi.

He thinks this may kill him.  

This is not how he wants to die. Not that he doesn’t want to die for love—any death he’d have in this war would be for love of some kind, and he thinks he’s come to peace with that. But dying a sad death, all alone possibly in this dungeon in the night with no one to hear him, no one to save his heart, with love choking him from the inside out and Levi the last thing on his mind, is not how he wants to die. He wants to live, to see this war to the end, or as far to the end as he can get. He wants to see the ocean.  He wants Levi to know, at least, that he loves him. Has loved him and will always love him.  It doesn’t matter that Levi doesn’t love him back. He wants to die with Levi having known. The other details don’t matter as long as he can have that. In dreams, he wishes he can have Levi, too, but Eren wakes with tears and he curses his heart.

His heart, that beats and beats.

* * *

 

Eren wakes hours before dawn with his hands tearing at his throat.

Thrashing on his bed, he digs his nails into his skin and pulls, blood pooling under his fingernails and dripping down his neck, gathering in the hollows of his collarbones. Everything stings and he feels frantic, desperate. Something is crawling up his throat, clogging the access, much worse than anything before. He’d never woken up like this; it had always happened in the evening, after a day spent around Levi, quick glances, light touches during training.

The only thoughts he has aren’t even words, just instincts, ones that scream for him to pull his esophagus from his body and crack it open. _Out, out, out_ . Strangled sounds echo off the damp walls. His heart feels like it’s a hundred pounds, slamming against his ribs. It’s like his body is trying to turn itself inside out. He needs it _out_.

Flashes of images pass through his head. The clouds over the walls. Armin and Mikasa when they were young. His mother and father at the kitchen table. Purple wildflowers. Levi under the sun in the breeze. Levi above him, swords raised, blood raining down. Levi pulling him from his titan’s neck. Levi once more, then again, and again.

When he thinks he’s going to pass out, his hands lock and he trembles. He can’t move his fingers, but he knows he has to move or he’ll choke on the oncoming sickness, so he snaps his neck to the side and rolls, throwing up over the bed. The floor coats with the flowers and his blood, his throat open and raw. He flinches and the skin tightens, fresh droplets falling with every movement. But he can breathe again, even though his hands are curled and his muscles are sore and there’s blood and flowers spread everywhere.

Thankfully, this happened early. He has time before anyone notices he’s late for anything, so he lets himself lay there, head hanging over the side in what now is a familiar picture. He’s not sure if he’ll be able to train today. Whatever’s going on with him, it seems to worsen, taking over more and more of the body the longer it goes on. He doesn’t even know how to fix it. It’s love, of course. It can be nothing else. There’s been no other reported cases that he knows of that detail something like this, though, so he has no idea what to do. He has no idea how long it will take to kill him.

Spit drips from his mouth. He doesn’t want to ask anyone about this, because if they found out he was sick, they’d probably take him away and lock him up with the MPs, far away from his friends, from the war, from Levi. There’s no way he’ll let that happen.

Better to die here, he guesses.

He thinks of the other day, Levi’s hand on his shoulder, the sun framing him just so. His body flushes and his gut twists and even though he has no energy for it, he thinks he’ll have to be sick again just to get it out. This _love_. He needs to get it out of him before it kills him from the inside out.

The thought that he really will die from this comes, but he doesn’t do anything. He just lays there, limp, and wonders how he’ll clean this up with his body hurting like this. Even though he has control over himself now, he’s surprised he hasn’t transformed with the way he was clawing at himself, bloodying his own neck, flowers cutting harsh paths up his throat and past his lips.

He groans and turns back over. Fighting past the ache, he gets up and rubs his fingers until they straighten back out. He has to use the prong from his belt to get all the skin and blood that collected under his fingernails. His hair is caked with sweat and his clothes smell.

Then, he realizes with a sinking feeling, there’s the issue of his neck. How will he go upstairs with his body like this? Attributing it to bad dreams might do it, but he’s not sure if anyone else in the corp has torn their own flesh open because of a nightmare.

He cleans in silence, trying to figure a way he can cover up the damage. There’s nothing else for him to use down there, so he rips off a shred of his bedsheets and ties it around his neck once he changes and the bleeding let up enough. It’s all kind of morbid, really, because he thinks if he’s going to die from this, it’ll be soon, and all he wants in that moment is to go back to the flower field. To feel the sun, the wind. Mabe even see Levi, if he’s lucky. That’ll probably do it for him, anyway.

Once he opens the door and starts up the steps, he sees that the sun is just about to rise. No one should be up yet, so he won’t have to worry about missing breakfast, or wandering commanders finding him.

He tightens the sheet around his neck, wincing when his hands brush the wounds. He’s thankful he didn’t have a mirror; he doesn’t want to see.

He makes it to the field without seeing anyone else. The ground is still damp from dew, but he sits down cross-legged anyway. The sun creeps over the horizon, bringing warmth to edge away the morning chill, and it looks like it’s going to be a beautiful day. Clear and blue.

Time passes slowly and the sun is nearly completely risen by the time he hears footsteps behind him. Footsteps he knows so well. He closes his eyes and smiles briefly before turning around. He’s so happy to hear them, even though he shouldn’t be.

“Hey, Eren.”

He looks back.

“Sir,” he says, unable to stop the smile from breaking on his face and bleeding into his voice as he cranes his neck to look.

Levi’s in full uniform, walking across the yard, eyebrows raised. “Thought I’d find you here,” he says. Eren takes in the way he looks, soft hair and loose cravat, shadows painting him, warm and cool. _Beautiful_.

“So this is why you get up so early,” he remarks, taking in the flowers swaying, the sun pouring over them in yellow light, the walls a far off and forgotten thing here.

Eren hums. “They remind me of my home.”

The birds start their chirping in the background. It’s so calm, just the way Eren likes it, before reality sets in. Before Levi is his captain, before he’s the monster meant to save humanity, before the war begins again. He likes just being Eren, Levi just being Levi.

Levi settles down next to him in the grass. He risks a glance over at him, heart alive with aching.

It hits him that this may be his last morning. His last time with Levi. If the sickness is only going to get worse, he might not make it out of bed the next day. Then he might not even wake up the day after that. Panic flares up in his gut for a moment, but if this is what he can have, he realizes it’s okay. He’ll take it. As long as he can say he had just a little more time with Levi, that’s alright.

“I haven’t missed what’s on your neck,” Levi says, not looking away from the field.

“Ah.” Eren’s hand comes up, lightly touching the tie that binds it. “I scratched myself.”

Levi turns. Eren can’t read his expression; it’s one he’s seen on him plenty before, he just doesn’t know what it means. He’s seen it when Levi had first met him, looking over his shoulder on the titan. He’s seen it when he accidentally transformed his hand reaching for the spoon, when he’d overworked himself, when they’d sat together at the dining table in the dark. Time after time, but Eren’s never understood it. It’s soft, a little open and bare. Despite knowing his expressions, his smiles, his jokes, this is one Eren’s never pinned down. He can recognize it easily enough, but the meaning is lost on him. Lost, like his heart.

Wordlessly, he reaches up, fingers trailing over the sheet. Eren nearly jolts, breathing picking up speed. He doesn’t want to disrupt the moment, so he stays very still, letting Levi touch him. He should pull away. He should push his hand back, put some distance between them, before it gets out of hand and he covers Levi in lilacs. Maybe in some other place, some other time, that would make for a pretty picture: Levi in nothing but flowers, his favorite, skin pale and limbs spread wide. Eren remembers the nightmare from when he was little, Levi’s throat blooming and tearing. He wishes he could banish that, erase it and write over it, planting a new memory of Levi draped in flowers instead.

He’s close. Eren can feel his breath when he speaks. “Let me see.”

Eren lets him do as he pleases, and Levi pulls the sheet off.

“Oh,” he says. “Oh, Eren.”

The sun is higher in the sky now, and Eren knows they should get going, but he doesn’t want to leave, not when Levi’s voice sounds like _that_ , not when he’s so close Eren can see the flecks of blue and green in his eyes.

“A nightmare?” he asks.

“Something like that.” He tilts his head back and hisses through his teeth at the stretch of his taut skin. “I might need the day off.”

They don’t get them often, but Levi nods, pulling his hand back. “You know,” he starts after a moment, “you seem to think I’m dense.”

“Dense?”

Levi runs a hand through his own hair and Eren watches it fall back to frame his face, strands catching on his eyelashes.

“There’s something you need to tell me.”

It’s not that he thought Levi dense, just that—Eren hadn’t thought he’d been paying attention. There’s so much else to worry about. The war, the plan, surviving long enough to see it til the end. Any number of important things. Just making sure Eren was alive and knew how to hold the blades properly seemed enough, and Eren isn’t a child, he isn’t petulant, he just knew there were priorities. His well being hadn’t been one of them, at least he hadn’t thought. He’s no stranger to Levi’s kindness, so that’s not it either. It may just be that the thought of Levi sparing him any mind other than in relation to the war and survival is hard for him to process.

Some time goes by before he speaks.

“I don’t know how,” he says. It comes out raw, much more so than he intended. Everything hurts, and he can feel his chest tightening. He’s not sure if it’s the flowers or just that he wants so badly to cry, scream, dig his hands into the soil and bury himself there so he can bloom and grow under the sun, tend himself towards it, grow tall for Levi in the midday breeze and become something he thinks is beautiful, maybe a lilac like the ones he liked so much from the vendor.

May it be so, perhaps, if he never leaves the dungeon again and dies already buried.

Levi watches him. He’s turned from the flowers and the view to look at Eren, slide his eyes from Eren’s face to neck and back up again. Eren may fall to pieces under his gaze.

“Is it something terrible?” Levi asks.

“No, I—” Eren fumbles for words. “I think I may be sick.”

Levi turns completely, feet tucked under his body, knees almost bumping into Eren’s thighs. He hunches forward to lean close.

“Sick.”

Eren nods. “And it’s trying to kill me, I think.”

Levi hums low. They should both be important places by now, talking to other people and worrying about things that matter more than this, but neither of them make a move to leave. The only thing that moves is the wind, and it takes them with it, blowing to the west, to where Levi has his back. Around him, the breeze breaks, and his hair floats around his face and makes Eren feel like time slowed.

“Some kind of titan side effect?” The words sound like they’re from universes away. Reality shifts and breaks apart. It’s just he and Levi, the field, the sun, the breeze.

Levi is leaning closer still. He leans in with the breeze.

Eren shakes his head. “No.” It’s but a whisper.

At first, Levi’s palm hovers over the back of Eren’s hand. Just a ghost of a touch. Then it follows the path his arm makes, an upward trek, leaving goosebumps in its wake if he needed to make a fast retreat and leave Eren shivering in the warm, lovely day. Eren can’t take his eyes from Levi’s, who only stares back while his hand meets neck, fingers flit over jaw, and finally his palm fits just so by Eren’s pulse and he cups him like they were lost pieces placed back together.

“You don’t know how to tell me?” Levi whispers in turn. Eren’s heart is a storm in his chest. He can say nothing.

“Then maybe—”

And then it’s happening; Levi is pulling him in, thumb pressing sweetly into his cheek—

The first touch is maddening, lips on lips, barely anything but enough to matter. Levi opens his lips with tongue, kissing him so slowly a thousand years pass between heartbeats. Eren leans back and Levi leans forward, cradling his head all the while. Behind his eyelids, Eren sees phosphenes in bursts of purple and white that remind him of lilacs, and of death, but Levi is breathing into him and those things fade away to black. Things just become Levi after that.

When they part, they don’t go very far. Levi keeps leaning in to lick back inside; Eren will let him every time. He’d been so ready to write this off as a dream, something that would never happen, something that would send him to the earliest of graves. He would have died for Levi and his kiss. Even just the thought of him would have been enough to convince Eren to lay down and let himself grow over as a garden and leave this life behind. But Levi had taken that from him with lips and tongue and things communicated in the interim, and Eren’s chest feels not quite lighter but like whatever had been trying to escape to find another home to waste away in love has finally unfurled, petals reaching, happy to take root somewhere it will finally be cared for. Finally loved in turn.

A panic sets in that maybe he has died, maybe when Levi had taken the sheet from his neck vines and small purple petals had exploded outward in a rain of carnage, and he’d left Levi there to deal with the heartbroken corpse of a young boy in his arms. But then Levi speaks, and reality snaps back into place. He blinks from the suddenness.

“That enough to cure it?”

There’s no way that Levi could possibly know what he’d been going through, at least not the reality of it. He’d obviously been able to see that Eren _was_ sick, just sick in love, but he couldn’t have known the way in which it was slowly taking him apart. Or maybe he did. Eren can’t tell, and he doesn’t want to speak of it just yet—the flowers need time to grow, and he needs to learn to breathe with them, and with the way Levi’s looking at him, and kissing him again.

“Do you still need the day off?” Levi asks after Eren doesn’t answer his other question. But he’s smiling this time, a tender thing. He holds the side of Eren’s neck with his other hand and just keeps it there.

“Yeah,” Eren says, smiling. “I’ll tell you everything, then.”

Levi nods and brings them to their feet. He takes Eren’s hand and turns, leaving the sun behind them. He looks over his shoulder at Eren holding onto him.

“Let’s go to my quarters.”

“Anywhere,” Eren says. When they get there, he’ll tell Levi all about the flowers, the blood, the sickness, and even the dream. He’ll crack his chest open and spill all of it. And he’ll kiss him, over and over, until they fall to bed and don’t leave for the rest of the day and the night.

They will be there until morning light.

**Author's Note:**

> title from danny by nicole dollanganger. [tumblr!](http://graves-n.tumblr.com)


End file.
